Goodbye!

I'm curious Phoenix, how often you check WZI. It's hard to put a play time of 24d into context if you only check the game, say, every 5 days (in which case you should probably invest in more idle time), versus someone like me who checks about 3-5 times a day. If you're checking almost every day and still have play a play time of 24d, I do think you should listen to everyone's advice here and change your playstyle, especially surrounding mercs and crafters.

I'm not trying to belittle you or anything -- just merely stating that if most people on their first playthrough beat the levels 3-4x faster than you (it seems like Scandinavia the first time took me 5.5 days), there's actual evidence that their play style is more effective, and it's worthwhile to learn what they're doing differently. (Even if you have IAP and they don't, they're still getting AP ~2.5-3x faster than you). If you say you've had "bad experiences" trying to follow others' advice in the past, maybe try to see what you missed? After all, they're playing the same levels as you, so there's no reason it shouldn't work for you.

Here's a simple calculation justifying why mercs are better than upgrading army camps past 2B or so. Assume a level is going to take another 7 days. Upgrading a camp probably gets about +400 troops/sec which over the course of 7 days gets ~250M troops, so you're effectively paying $8 per army -- which is a very mediocre rate on most levels (assuming merc discount AP and a couple tech levels of merc discount). If you're thinking of a 10B upgrade, that's 40/army which is crazy to pay. And you don't get all the armies now, you get most later. You ask how to fund buying these mercenaries -- but the army camp upgrades are ultimately costing you more, or you're needlessly spending too long on levels. It is true that you need to spend AP to buy additional mercs so you won't run out -- but this is exactly why it's so ridiculously good to do it.

Secondly, here's why it's less profitable to only use smelters to fund the crafter economy. Let's say I can make enough tin bars to fund 2 crafters full time, but I have 4. If tin cans sell for 50M and take 10m, you make 5M/min. Let's say buying enough tin bars off the market to fund 1 tin can costs 5M. Buying those tin bars for the additional tin cans increases profit to 9M/min, which is a 1.8x increase. Sure you're making less money per can, but youre making more overall. Similarly, buying 50% increased crafter speed won't improve your economy by exactly 2x -- it'll take it to 17M/min, but it's pretty close, and better than no increase. It speeds up levels massively to purchase the deficit alloys.

It's also very profitable to run this economy as soon as you can -- and thus maybe you should worry about crafting for tech closer to the end of the level. The upfront money is really useful for upgrading hospitals, buying mercs to find more crafters. etc.

Edited 7/31/2021 18:35:48

Haha maybe both you and me are not very good at tones (at least from my years of experience in living on Earth, I'm sure that I'm not good at it)
----------------------------------------------------------------
I never upgrade army camps that cost more than 100M. And from my level times, you know that merc-based gameplay can indeed work. So lemme answer some of your questions on why can it work.

Question:
Where do you get all this money from to buy them all by times and how do you keep yourself from buying too many mercs and end up in a situation where your army camps are essentially at stage 1, all your mercs are gone, you have barely any cash and still half the map is unconquered?

Answer:
By investing like 20k AP in money-generating advancements first lol. Mercs-based gameplay isn't realistic in ascension 1 and the first half of ascension 2. It only starts becoming realistic in the second half of ascension 2. Before that, you have to rely on army camps. During my Scandinavia run in ascension 2 I didn't go full-mercs not because I chose not to, but because I didn't have enough AP to make it work. In the second half of ascension 2 I slowly upgrade my Additional Mercenaries based on how much mercs I can afford buying with my money generation. By the end of ascension 2 I was fully merc-based.

Since your guide is intended to be a long-term one and covers until the end of ascension 3, and merc-based gameplay is realistic once you've reached the second half of ascension 2, it's important for me to bring up merc-based gameplay.

With the help of Additional Mercenaries, I never run out of mercs, so there's no such thing as "all your mercs are gone". When I'm out of money, I conquer territories and bonuses containing caches, and sell whatever from the caches to turn them into money to buy more mercs so I have more army to get more caches, and repeat and repeat and repeat until I finish the level. Occasionally I need to wait for a few hours when I'm out of both money and army before I can start another chain reaction.

In my ascension 3 Scandinavia run, I spent 3 days 5 hours. Actually I spent more than 3 days to conquer half of the map and get some techs that help with mercs cost and item sell values. Then I spent 2 hours just clicking and conquered the remaining half of the map in one go using chain reactions with the help by caches.

I don't actually rely on crafters that much. I've only started investing AP on Speedy Crafters recently, mid-way through ascension 3. By the time I get good crafting recipes, I'm already in a good shape to finish off the level in one go anyway using chain reactions.

----------------------------------------------------

Your comment:
Stopping to invest in army camps isn't logical (a day has 86,400 seconds and each second an upgraded army camp produces more armies)

My reply:
Alternatively I can invest the money in mercs to capture more bonuses. A day has 86400 seconds and each second a captured bonus produces more money, which can used to buy mercs.

And of course I never run out of merc because of Additional Mercenaries.

That gives me more extra armies than investing in army camps directly.

-------------------------------------------------------

Your comment:
But then again, if I would spent less time in each level, the territory and bonus income would decrease and so, I guess I would be reliant on the caches more.

My reply:
Yep that's exactly what's happened to me during ascension 2 when level times start decreasing a lot. As you can tell, now I heavily rely on caches.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Question:
Sure, you can speed up your level times by not investing in IAP but literally anything else. But will this also improve your AP income as much as IAP does?

Answer:
Of course. Increased AP can only increase AP income by at most 25%. I was talking about a 67% time save. A 25% time save increases AP income rate by 203%, which is more than 25%.

Having said that, I've upgraded IAP a bit. Currently my IAP is at 17%. Probably I'll max it before finishing ascension 3. It all boils down to comparing the increase in "AP gain per unit time per AP invested" by investing on time save advancements and by investing on IAP directly.

I won't recommend upgrading IAP to 25% in one go. But I also won't recommend not touching IAP at all. Since each upgrade is more expensive, the optimal way to do it is probably upgrading IAP along with other stuff. Each time when you upgrade IAP once, the "AP gain per unit time per AP invested" for the next IAP upgrade decreases, so there may be a few time save advancements that now do a better job. And after getting those few time save upgrades, IAP becomes the optimal option again so you click upgrade IAP once. After that one click the next IAP upgrade becomes less appealing again. Etc...

----------------------------------------------------------

Question:
Why? Because they played identical or because they invested in different advs but still ended the second ascension at the same time?

Answer:
Instead of using the finish of ascension 2 as the starting point, lemme use ascension 2 Old Town as a starting point. That's around that point when I started deviating from a pure army camp gameplay.

For the sake of this thought experiment, let's say if X and Y played identically in ascension 1 and the first half of ascension 2 until completing Old Town, without ever upgrading Additional Mercenaries. After ascension 2 Old Town, X then invest all AP earned in the future on Additional Mercenaries and nothing else until reaching 100% Additional Mercenaries, while Y never invest in Additional Mercenaries at all. In this scenario I'm pretty sure that X will finish ascension 4 before Y finish ascension 3.

It's just me trying to give an impression of how big a difference can mercenaries make, and this big difference makes "saving up for unlocking phase 4" unnecessary because you can actually unlock phase 4 faster if you don't save up.

I will read all of this but right now, I only want to address one thing:

it seems like Scandinavia the first time took me 5.5 days

Then Mathematician isn't good at this game either. There was no time given for first attempt, but in the post was a time for the second one

During ascension 2, I beat Scandinavia in 9 days 17 hours.

So, either with your 5.5 days there is something fishy, or you found way better advs than both me and Mathematician, or I don't know. I play without SuperCamp, perhaps that boosted your times (significantly). Or how often do you activate the ad-based army camp boost? For a merc-centric strategy this might not be overly important, but I play mostly on PC and therefore only watch ads twice a day (see below for how this relates to my active hours). But with a time of nearly 10 days on Mathematician's second play through, my 24 days seem pretty much in line (perhaps a BIT too high) for first attempt. Otherwise, moving from 5.5 days in first attempt to almost 10 days on second would be a huge step back. Or is your number based on a (very) early map generation that was just faster to finish? Then the numbers wouldn't be comparable anymore.

I currently have only 2h idle time and at day I almost never exceed it, at night I use a 40min artifact on top. Therefore, more than 16h count as active play time per day. Plus occasional Time Warps (if the map has some or the daily reward features one).

My first Scandinavia attempt was 13 days 22 hours, but that was before the balance update in February. The map was very different, so it's not comparable. Besides, I was trying to highlight the difference that mercenaries made. Mercenaries wasn't the main difference between my first and second attempt. Rather, it was the main difference between my second and third attempt.

24 days sounds decent for a first-attempt time for Scandinavia with the current map generation. Probably I'd have a similar time as well if I was working with the current map generation given that your ascension 1 gameplay seems to be quite similar to what I did. As I've mentioned, I started merc-based gameplay in the second half of ascension 2. Before that, I was army camp based and did similar things as you did.

Warzone Idle had been changing a lot since its launch until around February 2021 when it finally stabilized. When Warzone Idle was launched a year ago, the levels were ridiculously easy, and being made harder in each update.

I started playing Idle in October 2020, when the maps were still much easier than now. That's the reason why in some maps my first-attempt time was even faster than my second-attempt time. For example, my first attempt for Reconquest 1065 was 2 days 23 hours, but my second attempt after ascension was 3 days 11 hours.

If I remember correctly, the February update happened when I was playing the final few levels of my first ascension. So, all my second attempts (and third attempts) were using the current map generation, which makes it easier to compare.

I think you confused me and Mathematician -- I claimed Scandinavia took 5.5 days the first time. I never gave a second time, and I can't find this in level stats, though most levels my second time took about 3 days, so I'd guess that.

I started playing in Nov 2020 and played Scandinavia for the first time in Jan 2021. This was before some balance changes, but I doubt it was all that different, seeing as my second play time was about half the first, which is fairly consistent with others.

As for the question of why the levels took so little time -- that's exactly my evidence for the argument that my strategy works better? Not sure what I'm supposed to say here. I didn't have supercamp, or anything else other than powers on the level itself.

The strategy is basically: Use mercs for armies (army camps are irrelevant), crafting for money (bonuses are irrelevant). Upgrade all hopsitals a lot -- to basically the max except ridiculously expensive upgrades. Until I have all hospitals and upgraded them, only take territories on the way to a crafter or hospital -- it's a massive waste to pay for a territory now that hospitals can take for free later. Obviously, because of fog you can't do this efficiently, but try to.

I don't think you need until the second playthrough to make army camps irrelevant -- though you have to make sure you use hospitals effectively to not run out of mercs.

Edited 8/1/2021 07:44:01

Reading megaol's comments, seems that it's actually possible to switch to merc-based play earlier than I've suggested. Maybe you'll need to ask megaol exactly how does it work. Maybe it's a combination of utilizing crafters (which I did badly) and not doing stupid things like dumping AP into Increased Draft Sizes (which is something I did that makes no sense).

For sure I know that switching to merc-based play can be done starting at the second half of ascension 2 because I did it. Of course it doesn't mean that it cannot be done earlier with more optimized play, especially with crafters being utilized. I didn't use crafters much and relied on bonuses and caches only until midway through ascension 3, which was probably a big mistake that made it harder for me to switch to merc-based playstyle earlier.

And even though many aspects of my gameplay is non-optimal, or even quite bad actually, my gameplay is certainly still much better than any strategies that continue to rely on army camps throughout all of ascensions 2,3.

Even with the big mistake of not using crafters much, I could still make merc-based gameplay works so well. Imagine what can happen if you use merc-based gameplay while correctly utilizing crafters (which is probably what megaol did). This shows the importance of the Additional Mercenaries advancement, which is pretty much essential when talking about gameplay up to the end of ascension 3.

@Phoenix

> In all those numbers I don't count alloy values in general. I choose the recipe by greatest sell value, not profit like it is noted on the Smelt Stats.

I think above is the root cause of the difference of your play time and others.

I strongly recommend you to do the following calculations yourself.
* Calculate the profit per second of each recipe (with artifacts and advancements) assuming that the ingredient supply is infinite.
* Calculate the profit per second assuming that the ingredients are all purchased from markets.
If you have time, you can also try to do the following.
* Calculate the profit per second with your actual ingredient supply.

After ranking the profit per second of these recipes under different situations, we can find the best recipe to craft. We will see that certain recipes are significantly better than others.

Again, I will read all of this at some point and comment on what I think I can contribute something to. It's awesome how much reaction I got and I think I already switched plans (slightly).

Regarding krinid's initial reply: Yes, WZIC is a AP-loosing game but not as much as one might think. Well, in general I agree, just upgrading advs for challenges isn't great. But until recently I'd only beaten Huruey's castle (I have Auto-Conquer at 25%, but I don't know anymore whether this was necessary to beat this level or if less percentage was enough already), now with just Auto-Army Camp Upgrade unlocked (at 5%) in addition I managed to clear the next four challenges in one go. So, I had costs of 691 APs and got 400 APs back (I think, I honestly haven't really cared for the finish messages, but they all give 100 APs, right?). For 100 APs more I could double my Auto-Upgrader in the sense that it would only wait until half the money is reached to upgrade to the next stage. Not sure, if I want to test this out, but based on how the sixth challenge played out, this might be enough to beat it. Then, I would have spent 100 APs to win 100 APs. Still, investing in Auto-advs isn't any useful for me today, because I don't use them outside of battles and challenges. But I would argue that challenges aren't as bad as some think. If you have some decent baseline advs (that also benefit your normal levels), then only a few more APs invested can get you a few (or just one) more challenges. If only the buy-in costs / unlock costs of advs weren't that high.

Given my challenge rewards and as soon as I have the current map (Asia: Population) finished, I will have enough APs too unlock and max out Merc Discount. And I'm really thinking about doing this. This would be my first step towards a more merc-centric strat. As I said, Merc Discount for me is a requirement to such a strategy. I tend to not unlock/upgrade advs midway through a level (mostly because I just don't have enough to buy what I want to buy next), so I will wait and see whether this still appeals to me in a few weeks (even if I wanted to, I only could afford the unlocking right now). I really want to end this play through with Increased AP (to make the early levels on later play throughs worth something ;) ) but there are still a few levels after Asia to spend APs on other stuff, perhaps I try Additional Mercs. Let's see. I'm in one of those phases where for the guide I've just put something in the open slots between the blocks that I was sure about. And although I don't follow this plan, the phases of free-choice still line up so far.

And... no, I haven't confused you, megaol, with Mathematician. I just said your first ascension time and Mathematician's second ascension time don't line up at all. If I assume that you both are equally skilled (which is just an assumption for the sake of this argument), then a second ascension time should be lower than a first ascension time. As this is not the case, there has to be some explanation for this. So, either you are way more skilled then both me and Mathematician (which is a broad spectrum of what you perhaps do better), or you have bonuses that others don't have/use (SuperCamp, ad-boosts, AP-boosts with coins or CW rewards), or the numbers are on different map generations, or something else.

The min-max “Auto” advancement strategy is to disregard these for an extended period of time, then once a certain AP threshold is reached, rebalance AP into entirely “Auto” advancements, clear a bunch of challenges, win a bunch of battles, then rebalance AP back into non-“Auto” advancements.

Calculating this threshold is left as an exercise to the reader.

Assumptions:
1. Willingness to spend 300 coins
2. Fairly active player who would not be significantly benefited (or even hurt by) “Auto” advancements in regular WZI play
3. No or limited desire to do WZI battles or WZI challenges on a recurring basis

Edited 8/2/2021 13:46:04

Certainly not all Advancements are made equal. Some are simply better than others, and JS is the king of them all - not only b/c it's cheap, but b/c it constantly maintains its value from the moment you unlock it through 1st Ascension and long after even after 4th or 5th Ascension, it still holds value, which isn't the case for all Advancements. Merc & money based Advancements are directly after JS. Counting only army camp units & mercs, my ratio of armies earned is 4% army camps, 96% mercs. As you progress through levels, your speed gets QUICKER not SLOWER -- so army camps that require you to wait longer to get the benefits from (and let's be clear here - if you clear a level more quickly, you're earning less armies from your camps unless you somehow hyper-upgrade them asap, but then you still have to wait to earn the units from them) do not align to this strategy, but merc & quick money making strat aligns to clearing faster. Basically, it's quicker to craft, earn money & buy mercs, then it is to craft, earn money, upgrade camps, wait for armies to accumulate.

In my opinion, the best advancements are, in order of raw value, not in order they should/can be unlocked:

- Joint Strike
- Better Hospitals
- Increased Cache Armies
- Increase Crafters Speed
- Increase Item Sell Values
- Additional Mercs
- Discounted Mercs
- Increased AP
- Increased Cache Money
- Increased Army Camp Production
- Increased Ore Sell Values
- Discounted Mine Upgrades
- Faster Digging
- Increased Cache Resources

And I've purposely left these two out . . . b/c they are essentially a set pair, and by the time you can afford them, you likely no longer need them b/c you've already Ascended 3-4 times and probably don't care about playing ML anymore, and maybe not even WZI anymore at all.

- Simultaneous Levels
- Can Skip Levels

But of course you can't unlock them in that order b/c some are locked in phase 2, 3 or 4. Now if I reordered these into the order that they should be unlocked & unless stipulated also fully maxed out before continuing down the list, I'd probably say:

[phase 1]
- *Joint Strike
- Increased Army Camp Production - only to ~100%
- *Additional Mercs
- Increased Ore Sell Values
- Discounted Mine Upgrades
- *Increased Cache Money
[phase 2]
- *Increase Crafters Speed
- *Discounted Mercs
- *Increased AP
- *Increased Cache Resources
- Increased Army Camp Production - up to 200-300%

[phase 3]
- *Increase Item Sell Values
- Increased Money from Bonuses

[phase 4]
- *Increased Cache Armies
- *Better Hospitals
- *Faster Digging

NOTE:
- Items with asterisks are the ones that will give the highest value AFTER your 1st Ascension b/c they aren't related to time, but rather to activity, such as capturing a territory, crafting items, etc. Completing a level more quickly doesn't impact the value these advancements provide.
- Item without an asterisk are time based, meaning you need time to pass in order to get benefit from those advancements, and thus as you level up and begin to complete levels more quickly, the less value these advancements will provide.
- Thus, imho advancements like JS, Additional+Discounted Mercs, the Cache bonuses, Better Hospitals, Crafter Speed, Item Sell Values have higher longer term value than advancements like IACP, Ore sell value, Increased Money from Bonuses. We can call these "long term benefit advancements" (LTBA) and "short term benefit advancements" (STBA).
- STBA are still necessary to do better on your 1st playthrough, even to some degree on your 2nd playthrough. IACP up to 200-300% is still likely going to have some value in early level phases before mercs & crafters come into play.
- But as your level clear times decrease, you're going to have less time to mine ore, to earn money from bonuses, to accumulate armies from army camps, etc. What took 16+ days to clear on the first playthrough and allowed you to generate lots of armies/ore/money, will only take 4-7 days on the 2nd playthrough, vastly reducing the benefit you receive from these STBA. This became clear to me when I compared my level clear stats of levels from my 1st and 2nd playthroughs, and finding that despite upgrading IACP, Ore sell values, Money bonuses, etc, that my armies from camps, income from selling ore & from bonuses was significantly down each time. Of course this is the simple math of VERY LONG TIME * MediumValue >> VERY SHORT TIME * HighValue.
- But the LTBA are related to activities such as buying mercs, capturing territories or caches, crafting items (technically this is still somewhat time based but this LTBA actually makes things craft more quickly, so it mitigates this factor), finishing levels, etc. So the benefit these provide doesn't reduce as your clear speed decreases, and they continue to offer high value despite the value of the STBAs reducing.
- It actually poses the question whether investing in a blend of STBAs & LTBAs to get through the 1st playthrough and maybe part or all of the 2nd is still recommended, and then resetting AP to focus on the LTBAs from that point forward.

@Phoenix
Btw, yes it was me that didn't upgrade army camps for more than 1B cost. Now I typically don't even go past ~200M b/c at the end of the level, regardless of how much money I put into upgrading them, they just don't give much output compared to mercs, hospitals, JS, caches & drafts (usually in this order). Armies from army camps is always last. So I just repurpose the money into hospital upgrades.

That said, army camps are valuable for the early game, before crafting & merc camps are available. They get the level started and moving to transition into the crafting/hospital/merc mid & end game. Once I enter that stage, all money either goes to (a) buying mercs, (b) upgrading hospitals, (c) buying ingredients to craft items so I can sell and then do (a) or (b).

Now, I've read everything, let's see if I remember everything I wanted to comment on:

---

Following this strategy, I managed to complete AD 1045 in 5 days.

Given your strategy and the APs this would cost, this will be in 2nd ascension, right? Let's see what my numbers will be then. I'm actually curious. Especially if I stick to a different strategy then everyone else. If I just copy you, I will likely get the exact same numbers.

Mercs-based gameplay isn't realistic in ascension 1 and the first half of ascension 2. It only starts becoming realistic in the second half of ascension 2.

Thanks, mate! While you are already doubting this statement yourself, this finally is a statement that is still somewhat true and can take some pressure from new players that get told that mercs are the ultimate answer to everything but can't make this work (like I commented on my attempt with the Peloponnese map). Similarly to the claims that upgrading artifacts is said to be always superior to swapping, which - if I may repeat - is not true if you can't upgrade at least two or three artifacts to epic or higher (or somewhere around that point, I haven't calculated this but estimated, so you might be able to make this work earlier or even need more fodder material).

Since your guide is intended to be a long-term one and covers until the end of ascension 3, and merc-based gameplay is realistic once you've reached the second half of ascension 2, it's important for me to bring up merc-based gameplay.

I see this and I agree. From my little (to no) experience of late-game gameplay (where late here means, with lots of APs) I really only were able to estimate what the future might bring. And I was still caught in a somewhat binary thinking: Either some advs are highly effective or they serve no purpose. I think I should see more of the gray scales in between.

With the help of Additional Mercenaries, I never run out of mercs, so there's no such thing as "all your mercs are gone".

Well, with no additional mercs, this situation happened to me all the time. And maxing out additional mercs isn't exactly cheap. So, seeing that mercs only cover 20% of my armies (as we now know) and knowing that buying mercs can often completely drain your money balance, I wasn't able to see the value of additional mercs IN THIS PHASE OF ME PLAYING WZI. But, yeah, I now accepted that my strategy isn't suitable for the long run.

Alternatively I can invest the money in mercs to capture more bonuses. A day has 86400 seconds and each second a captured bonus produces more money, which can used to buy mercs.

My original statement wasn't meant to be taken for face value. I know that upgrading an army camp minutes before finishing a level is ridiculous. But with only the 20% stock mercs (and no additional ones), you NEED army camp production, and then upgrading can be the right choice even if the break even point will never come before the level is done.
But I never really saw the other side of the picture, that conquering territories with bought mercs can also mean long term benefits. It's not just one less territory to conquer in order to clear the level, it's some over-time-benefits. Still, with no additional mercs and the fact that you only unlock the Merc Discount Techs rather late in the game, I think that saving most of them for the end, is still the best approach for my way of playing idle.

It all boils down to comparing the increase in "AP gain per unit time per AP invested" by investing on time save advancements and by investing on IAP directly.

I was about to say, that a speed-up of 67% with additional mercs isn't comparable to IAP because the mercs adv costs - what - three times as much APs than IAP (to max out), but fortunately you more or less added this yourself. I think that there are soo many factors to WZI that you can't calculate the exact time savings per spent AP, but I already figured this out for each individual adv. Most advs have their peak at stage 3 to 5. Best IACP is at 30 or 40% iirc, best IAP is 7% or so... There is one adv, though, (can't remember which one unfortunately) that has its peak at stage 1. So, already the first upgrade is a loss in efficiency. But this piece of information won't be a good guide when it comes to idle, there is so much more involved than just best ROI when it comes to advs.

As for the question of why the levels took so little time -- that's exactly my evidence for the argument that my strategy works better? Not sure what I'm supposed to say here. I didn't have supercamp, or anything else other than powers on the level itself.

To make this clear, I'm not calling you a liar! It's just hard to believe. At this point, one has 4.1k APs to spend, so, sure, you can have unlocked and upgraded additional mercs a bit, you can have maxed out money cache boost. But still, you make it sound like there were always enough mercs, which is hard to believe, and there was (almost) never too little money, which I could see work but still unlikely. Perhaps (to paraphrase Parsifal) you should try to write down your strategy as best as you remember. This could really be the one piece of information that might convince more players that mercs are the key even early on.

I strongly recommend you to do the following calculations yourself.

I'll move my reply to this to a separate post, this is already getting way too long and I want to highlight some aspects for crafting.

We can call these "long term benefit advancements" (LTBA) and "short term benefit advancements" (STBA).

I've seen this analysis already because you effectively posted it twice into two different discussions. And I totally agree. I'm just not sure yet, what that means for my strategy. As you highlighted yourself, it does not tell us anything about whether one type might be strictly superior to the other or not. And there is also the third time of advs, the "convenience advs", like stats, any of the visibility advs, the auto-advs, (to some extend) idle time.

@Phoenix

>> Following this strategy, I managed to complete AD 1045 in 5 days.
> Given your strategy and the APs this would cost, this will be in 2nd ascension, right? Let's see what my numbers will be then. I'm actually curious. Especially if I stick to a different strategy then everyone else. If I just copy you, I will likely get the exact same numbers.

The advancements in my first reply in the thread consists of advancements that I have already obtained, and those I plan to obtain. Below are my latest advancements.

* Increased Army Camp Production: 100%
* Joint Strike: 25%
* Increased Ore Sell Values: 100%
* Additional Mercenaries: 42.5%
* Statistics: 1
* Auto-Conquer: 5%
* Mercenary Discount: 35%
* Increase Crafters Speed: 25%
(I got Statistics 1 to estimate the length a level much more accurately.)

> > Mercs-based gameplay isn't realistic in ascension 1 and the first half of ascension 2. It only starts becoming realistic in the second half of ascension 2.
> Thanks, mate! While you are already doubting this statement yourself, this finally is a statement that is still somewhat true and can take some pressure from new players that get told that mercs are the ultimate answer to everything but can't make this work (like I commented on my attempt with the Peloponnese map).

I would say that this claim is false. It is possible to employ merc-based strategy in the first playthrough. I am currently using it, and it works very well. Below is the time I spent on some levels I finished recently.

* Reconquest 1065: 5 days
* Fort Harbor: 4 days 4 hours
* Europe 1066 AD: 4 days 21 hours
* AD 1045 - Roads of Silk and Iron: 4 days 13 hours
* Old Town: 4 days 2 hours
* Orbis Veteribus Notus: 4 days 9 hours

I am getting more and more familiar with mercs, and I expect to finish Scandinavia in about 4 days.

I agree with functor.

For 5876 AP, you can bring additional mercs to 60% and max out discount mercs, cache money, cache resources, and ore sell values. For another 3282 AP, you can also max out crafter speed.

This is very achievable during the first ascension.

Now, let's focus on smelting/crafting only. I will mention some extremes a few times, to differentiate several approaches, but (a) I'm aware that there will be only few players that fall into these extreme categories, most will be somewhere in between, and (b) that this will apply nonetheless because even if you use a composite approach, all the statements will still be true for the part of your composite strategy that uses approach 1, and the other comments will be true for the part of approach 2. If you - say - switch from smelting for techs to smelting for profit at some point in each level, you will be covered by different parts of my analysis at different points in time.

There are three strategies for smelting (if we assume there is no crafting):

• not smelting at all
  
• smelting for techs
  
• smelting for profit

Not smelting at all is a waste if there is at least one recipe that makes any profit. Smelting for techs is fine (especially on one's first play through in order to get the achievement) but for this approach you don't care for an alloy's sell value or the sell values of the ores. When smelting for profit, you will look at the alloy's sell value and (depending on your point of view) also on the ores' sell values. If you read on, you will see that I would probably only take the alloy's sell value into account here, but the situation that I have smelters to spare is really rare, so the only viable option for me here is smelting for techs. If I don't craft (because I haven't found crafters yet) or if I can spare a smelter, then I only smelt for techs. After my first ascension I might (I don't know yet) stop unlocking techs (or at least some of them) so I might abandon smelting as a stand-alone thing at all (or switch to profit smelting as long as the following parts don't apply).

When it comes to crafting there are several dimensions:
First you can:

• not craft at all

which again, is a waste if there is at least one profitable recipe. If you chose to craft you have the options to:

• craft for techs, and
• craft for profit

and then there is a different dimension whether you want to:

• buy ingredients from markets, or
• produce everything yourself

If you craft for techs, all the sell values don't influence your recipe choice. It really doesn't matter that you are working on the lowest profit recipe or the highest profit one, whatever you crafted will be spent on techs anyway. If you craft for profit, this changes. Again, in this case the items' sell values are relevant to determine the profit of some recipe. And if you buy ingredients from markets you also have to include their sell values into the equation (more or less because buy prices are related to (unbuffed) sell values). But if you craft only with your own smelted alloys and crafted items (note: I will take any overproduction of intermediate items into account, I just don't care for the used up alloys, but crafting recipes that require other items aren't really profitable at all (at this point), so this case rarely comes up), the value of your ingredients isn't as important anymore. Here's why: While for crafting from bought ingredients the buy prices are part of the profit and important to determine which recipes are profitable at all, for crafting from your own production the sell values of the ingredients are only important to determine whether a recipe is profitable at all. I will never craft a recipe for profit if it isn't profitable! Just like no-one of the crafting-from-markets guys will pick a recipe that isn't profitable after buying. But as soon as I have concluded that a crafting recipe has some profit (which, when crafting from one's own production most of the time has a significant profit that is almost always higher than several times the ingredients' value, so the invested value pales in comparison anyway), I only care for the sell value of this item per time unit and per involved crafter (and to a lesser extend the number of smelters). If one rivet crafter has profit x and three crafters that produce 2 times screws and one times metal pipes has profit y, I can calculate which one is a higher sell value per time and crafter (always rivets in this example). As I feel like I have problems arguing here, let me present you what I call "idle crafting". I apply this strategy as soon as possible and when I've crafted enough items to unlock all the techs.

"Idle crafting" follows a few conditions:

• My mines produce more ore than my smelters need
  
• My smelters produce more than my crafters need (I haven't run into the situation that this would involve smelting recipes that need alloys, but given that you mostly only need one alloy per type, I would probably ignore those alloy ingredients in smelting recipes)
  
• My crafters produce more than my crafters need
  
• I choose crafting recipes with the most profit/value (respecting my mine capabilities)

That can mean that:

• I have to upgrade my mines, although sometimes I accept that my mine production is slightly lower if I have enough ores in stock
  
• I can't put all crafters on one profitable recipe but have to spread them out a bit as I can't afford to upgrade all my mines to level 20.
  
• I can in most cases run this approach almost infinitely without having to babysit anything (hence the name) the only times I have to adjust is after unlocking a sell value tech (at times, even those techs don't change the profits by much) or when I claimed another crafting recipe

If for example, I chose my crafting recipes in a way that require 3.7 of my smelters to work on, say, lead and I put 4 smelters on lead, the only aspect that I will neglect by not taking alloy values into account, is 0.3 worth of one lead smelter's output. And by having a strictly positive ore balance, I don't have to calculate their value either. If you view this as one smelter immediately feeding another crafter, the value of the intermediate product becomes irrelevant.

The key here is that I will never select unprofitable recipes in the first place and that the value of the ingredients is neglectable in comparison to the value of the created product such that not taking alloy values into account just means that I will make (almost) the same error in my calculation for each and every recipe. So, the alloy values get irrelevant again.

If you now craft for profit and buy from markets, you can also choose to smelt for profit or to produce whatever your smelters will need such that you have to buy fewer alloys. I haven't calculated this because I don't use this approach, but if we assume that your most profitable crafting recipe needed copper bars, which alloy would start making more profit to move your smelters from copper to this alloy? Without any buffs, buy prices are seven times the sell values and later alloys need more time smelting. So, you would have to find an alloy that (considering the ores' values, too), make seven times as much profit after compensating for the longer smelt times. While for my example with copper this might already be tin, for silicon this could be gold, for platinum this might be neodymium. I'd say for realistic choices of crafting recipes, it could be most profitable to smelt whatever you need for crafting because at some point the alloy values seem to stagnate (per time unit) and the steps from the used alloy to the more profitable alloy get bigger and bigger.

I hope this got clear. I could extend this post for another hour to reiterate over everything that I do, but I think this wouldn't be beneficial. Either you got my point or it is better to let you ask questions.

@Phoenix

All the arguments you just post on crafting are only theoretical arguments, which are obtained from reasoning under some assumptions. I could point out some assumptions that I do not agree with, but I think you would just come up with more theoretical arguments to counter my points.

I really recommend you do some explicit calculations of the profit per second, using your artifacts, tech and advancements. If the calculated result favors your approach, then you can show it to us and prove that we are all wrong. If the calculated result does not favor yours, then you can trace back your arguments and find the faulty assumption.

Edit: When calculate the profit per second, please do not skip any steps, and do not make any simplification. Just use the most naive calculation.

Edited 8/7/2021 15:26:40

@Phoenix, you wanted me to recount my ascension 1 strategy to see how I got those level times. I don't have the victory screenshot from Scandinavia to explain in detail, but apparently I do have Rise and Fall of Rome. This one took 8d5h.

Total Money Earned: 8T
Money from Territories: 500B
Money from Bonuses: 500B
Money from selling ore: 4B
Money from selling items: 5.2T
Money from caches: 1.6T

Total Armies: 395B
Armies from Camps: 30B
Mercs Purchased: 228B
Armies from Caches: 120B
Armies from Drafts: 18B
Armies saved with JS: 111B
Armies saved from Hospitals: 215B

The money stats should illustrate the power of crafting for profit -- I likely got most of my money crafting explosive bolts, while buying platinum bars off the market.

More interesting though, are the army stats. You question whether there are enough sources of armies in the level to preclude needing armies from army camps -- but here I got negligible amounts from the camps even in my first playthrough. I would guess I had ~50% additional mercs at the time. One thing I'd guess that could be a major discrepancy is hospitals -- you want to max basically all of them except the first few. The way I value a hospital upgrade is (cost of upgrade)/(0.75*#territories left*additional armies saved). This will give an approximate cost of how much you're paying per army by doing this upgrade. In the first run, I upgraded hospitals to around 2 times the most expensive mercenary. Hospitals are super important not to run out of armies your first run. Moreover, you shouldn't take territories you don't need to just to complete bonuses, etc. since these are territories you could get for free with hospitals later. All your fog busts should be about finding hospitals and taking them efficiently, ignoring even army camps (crafters and good recipes are worth taking too). Milking hospitals for all they're worth is how you make up the deficit armies when playing a merc-based strategy.

The important advancements i likely had at the time are joint strike, +100% army camps, +50% mercs, max merc discount, autoconquer 10%. I don't remember numbers exactly; I might've had more or less army camp/mercs than I'm remembering, or also had some increased crafter speed, or Increased cache monies.

Seems that now we have most things in agreement.

While I started merc-based gameplay in the second half of second ascension, some people here are claiming that they successfully started using merc-based gameplay earlier. That may be true, given that I played pretty badly early on, for example I didn't use crafters for profit and I unnecessarily dumped lots of AP into Increased Draft Size. Without making these mistakes that I made, it sounds reasonable that some people can start relying on merc earlier than I do.

Anyway, here's something for me to comment on:

the mercs adv costs - what - three times as much APs than IAP (to max out)

That's true, but there's no much point to max out Additional Merc. Once I've reached like 90%, I've never ran out of merc ever again.

@functor: I guess we misunderstand each other. While I thought that you were criticizing my strategy to use different crafting recipes for each crafter, I now believe that you want to argue against my general approach of crafting from my own production. You don't have to, I already see the potential in crafting for profit from markets. I just haven't adapted this strategy yet. And I've read all those discussions about speedy crafters and such. The thing is, I still want to get all the achievements and if I settle for crafting for profit from markets, I'm not sure if I will get all the required items and alloys at the end or if I have to prolong a level just for some more whatever bars. As I hinted at, if you don't want all the achievements (for example because you already have them all), you can freely choose any smelting/crafting strategy you want. But from experience I know that there are alloys and items in every level that you need for techs but that aren't sold by any market, and that means that you need ores from mines, which itself takes time to produce. And even money can't help you with that. So, if I wanted to find an excuse, I'd say that the techs achievement are holding me back. But I'm fine with having a slower first ascension if I then have all the achievements completed and don't have to worry about them anymore.

@functor: about your initial reply here that listed your advs: why don't you invest in Discounted Mine Upgrades at all? I see that you have (or will have) Increased Ore Sell Value. But that assumes that there are ores to sell. Those ores have to come from mines and especially if you have very short level times, those mines have to be upgraded to a significant stage to even produce any meaningful amounts of ore that you then can sell. So, if your whole strategy is around making lots amounts of money, shouldn't you also try to cut costs where possible? I saw that krinid acknowledged that by putting both advs on his list and based on megaol's numbers I assume he hasn't invested in Ore Sell Values and isn't upgrading mines much (he makes only a 1000th of his item profit with selling ores). I'm just saying, how much value does Increased Ore Sell Value have if your level times are that short and if you don't have a Mine Upgrade Discount adv.

@megaol: I really wanted to find any flaws in the posted numbers, but they all work out one way or another. First, I doubted that you can constantly reach 33% hospital savings, especially on the final large territories (without the phase 4 Better Hospital adv), but the longer I think about it the more possible it sounds. And with 33% savings from hospitals and 25% JS, you already save 50% of all the armies that you need to clear the level. If another ~20% come from caches, it is apparent that only 30% have to come from mercs, which is 50% more than the stock 20% which lines up with your 50% additional mercs. As I said, I believe in your numbers, I'm just not sure i could play this way myself currently.

@Mathematician: true, the last third of an adv will likely make up half or more of the total cost. So, if 100% more mercs (which is two thirds of 150%, aka the maxed out amount) are all you need, than the adv effectively is only half in cost. Therefore, this adv is quite the opposite of most of the Auto-advs where they are only really effective if maxed out, so spending only a few APs to unlock the first stages doesn't get you anywhere.

With so much that has been said here, I realize more and more how little I know about this game and how right I was to call this a not-guide. I really have to thank you all for teaching me all this. Right now I only have to find my way to apply those findings to make up a strategy that feels good for me. I just checked whether I might want to reset my APs with what I know now, but luckily I found very little that feels wasted so far and that I can't make up for easily with the next few levels.